Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jaz turned away, suddenly overwhelmed by the intensity of her feelings.
“I need to check my data readings.”
“Of course,” he agreed solemnly, but there was a warm amusement in his voice that made her cheeks heat.
Half an hour later, he was seated across from her at the small work table, watching her with the focused intensity he brought to everything.
“Mineral,” she said, pointing to the sample on the table. “This is a mineral. I dig them from the ground.”
“Min-er-al.” He rolled the word around in his mouth. “Like… stone?”
“Similar. But more specific. Minerals have particular elements combined in particular ways. Some are valuable. Some are not.”
“And you…” He gestured at the scattered equipment around them. “You find the valuable ones?”
“I try to.” She picked up the sample, turning it so the faint metallic sheen caught the light. “This is what I was looking for before the storm. Before you… emerged.”
His expression shifted at that—something that looked like guilt moving behind his eyes. “I damaged your equipment. The machine that burned.”
“My drilling rig. Yes.” She set the sample down with a sigh. “That’s going to be a problem. Without it, I can’t reach the deposits I’ve been tracking. And without deposits, I can’t make enough to buy a new rig.”
“Catch-22,” he said carefully, and she blinked at him.
“Where did you learn that phrase?”
“You said it. Yesterday, when you were talking about…” He frowned, searching his memory. “Storm supplies. Running low, but cannot resupply until storm ends.”
God, his recall really is incredible.
“You’re right.” She shook her head slowly. “You really do remember everything, don’t you?”
“Not everything.” A shadow crossed his face. “Not the things I need. But words, sounds, patterns… yes. These I keep.”
She studied him, an idea forming in the back of her mind. He had emerged from deep beneath the ice cap—deeper than any survey had mapped. And he had lived here once, long before the terraforming efforts and before Mars had become a frontier for desperate colonists and ambitious corporations.
“Adjar,” she said slowly. “What do you remember about the ice? About what’s beneath it?”
He tilted his head. “Much. The ice was… home. I knew every layer, every pocket of air and stone. The warm places where water still moved. The cold places where time itself seemed frozen.”
Her heart began to beat faster. “Warm places? You mean geothermal vents?”
“I do not know this word. Places where heat rises from below. Where minerals gather in patterns like…” He struggled for the word. “Like flowers. Growing from the stone.”
Mineral blooms. He’s describing mineral blooms.
She grabbed her tablet, pulling up her survey maps with trembling fingers. “Here. Can you show me? On this map?”
He leaned forward, studying the display with furrowed brows. She watched him process the information—the contour lines, the depth markers, and the symbols she’d used to indicate potential deposit sites.
“This is the ice above,” he said slowly. “And this—” he traced a finger along a ridge line “—this is the old shore. From before.”
“Before?”
“Before the water left. Before the cold came.” His voice had gone distant, touched with the fragmented grief she’d heard before. “Mars was not always frozen. Once there were seas. Rivers. Growing things.”
She knew this, of course, but hearing him talk about it like a memory rather than a fact made her chest ache.
“The minerals I need are rare-earth elements,” she said, pulling herself back to the practical.
“They form under specific conditions such as high heat, high pressure, or particular chemical environments. My surveys suggested there might be deposits at depth, but my equipment couldn’t map the lower strata clearly. ”
He studied the tablet a moment longer, then moved his finger to a spot several kilometers from her current drilling area.
“Here,” he said with quiet certainty. “The deep wells. Where—” He stopped, his jaw tightening. “Where the Keepers slept. The heat rises there. Minerals grow thick on the walls.”
Her breath caught. “You’re sure?”
“I am sure.” He met her eyes. “I slept there for… very long. I know the taste of the stone and the feel of the ice. What you seek is there.”
If he’s right…
She ran the numbers in her head, barely daring to hope. If there were accessible deposits at that location and if she could get to them without a full drilling rig. If the concentration was even half what he seemed to be suggesting…
“I could replace the rig,” she breathed. “Hell, I could buy two rigs. I could—”
She stopped, afraid to say any more and jinx it. But the possibilities cascading through her mind were dizzying. Independence. Security. Everything she’d been working towards for years, suddenly within reach.
And all because an ancient dragon had crashed through her claim and into her life.
She looked at Adjar, and her breath caught.
“Thank you,” she said roughly.
“For what?”
“For this. For—” She gestured helplessly at the tablet and the maps and the possibility he’d just handed her. “You didn’t have to help me. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I owe you my life.”
“That’s not—”
“It is.” He rose from his chair, moving around the table until he stood before her.
This close, she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes—ice-blue and intense and fixed on her with an expression that made her pulse race.
“You saved me. You fed me. You held me through the cold. Now I give back. This is… balance.”
Balance. Such a simple word for something so complicated.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she rose onto her toes and kissed him again.
His arms came around her immediately, pulling her against the solid wall of his chest. She felt the rumble of that growl that seemed to originate somewhere deep in his core, and then his mouth was moving against hers and she forgot everything else.
Her hands found his shoulders, gripping the hard muscle beneath the warm scales.
His wings rustled and spread slightly, creating a cocoon around them, and she felt his tail curl around her calf like an anchor.
When they finally broke apart, both breathing hard, his forehead rested against hers and his hands had somehow found their way to her waist, his fingers splayed across the curve of her hips.
“I like this learning,” he murmured. “Very much.”
She laughed softly. “Me too. But we should probably focus on the matter at hand.”
“Which matter?” His thumb traced a distracting circle on her hip. “There are many matters I would like to attend to.”
The double meaning was obvious despite his imperfect language, and heat flooded her cheeks.
“The mining matter,” she clarified, but she didn’t step away. Instead, she leaned into him, letting herself enjoy the sensation of his body against hers.
“Ah.” He straightened reluctantly, but his hands remained on her waist. “The mineral. You will go there?”
“If I can figure out how to access the deposits.” She forced her brain back to practical matters. “The area you indicated is too deep for my equipment to reach, even if the rig was still intact. But still have the old equipment I started with, and if I can find a natural fissure or an old passage…”
Her words trailed off as a thought struck her.
She spun back to the tablet, pulling up the geological surveys of the region.
There was something here, something she’d overlooked in her initial analysis.
A thermal anomaly that had been dismissed as a survey error because it didn’t align with current tectonic activity.
But what if it wasn’t an error? What if it was exactly what he was describing—a remnant of the ancient Martian geological activity, a place where heat still rose from the depths?
“I think I know how to get there,” she said slowly.
He moved to stand beside her, peering at the display with interest. “Show me.”
For the next hour, she explained her plan, watching his face light up with understanding as she connected the dots between his memories and her data. The excitement building between them was not just the thrill of discovery, but something more intimate.
“We make a good team,” she said when she’d finished.
“Yes,” he agreed, but there was something in his tone made her look at him more closely. “What is it?”
“This is the first… future I have imagined.” He hesitated. “With you. I see a future with you.”
She reached up, tracing the line of his jaw, and felt the rough texture of his scales contrasted with the smoothness of his lips.
“That’s what I want too,” she whispered. “A future. With you.”
“I—” He broke off abruptly, his head tilting. “Your heater is dying.”
“What?” Now that he mentioned it, she realized that the temperature had been dropping for some time.
Her breath had started to hang visible in the dim light and the walls seemed to radiate cold instead of merely containing it.
She pulled her thermal jacket tighter and went to check the readouts, her stomach sinking at the numbers.
“This isn’t good.”
The habitat’s environmental systems had been designed for standard polar conditions, but the temperature outside had plummeted far below normal parameters, and the heater was losing the battle.
“What is wrong?” he asked.
“The cold’s overwhelming the heating system. We’re losing about two degrees an hour.” She tapped at the controls, trying to coax more output from the struggling unit. “If this keeps up, we’ll hit freezing inside within six hours.”
The thought sent a spike of fear through her. She could survive cold, but not indefinitely, and not if the storm lasted more than another day, which the readings suggested it might. He immediately came to stand next to her, heat radiating from him like a furnace.
“You are cold,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’m fine for now. But if—”